Deerhoof vs. Evil

A transitional record, Deerhoof's latest finds them sidling up to the kind of heavy rock that's been their secret weapon in the past.

Deerhoof's drummer Greg Saunier recently noted that "if there's any pressure on us, it's actually a pressure to not repeat." That's an admirable goal, and so far they've mostly stuck with it. They've spent most of their career as a fast-and-bulbous hybrid of a super-heavy, experimentation-minded art-rock band and a sweet little pop group, equal parts chirp and pummel. In the six-album-plus run from 2002's Reveille to 2008's Offend Maggie, they perpetually pushed the sound of the band into fresh if occasionally awkward territory.

They're also a totally idiomatic band, one of those groups where you usually only need to hear a few seconds' worth of any song to know it's them, whether or not bassist Satomi Matsuzaki is singing at the time. That puts Deerhoof in a difficult position: Their identity is built around all four members' particular quirks as musicians, but they're struggling not to repeat themselves, so they're hunting for new rooms within the house they have constructed for themselves.

It's been more than two years since Offend Maggie-- an unusually long stretch by their standards-- but Deerhoof vs. Evil is less a leap forward than a transitional record, along the lines of 2005's Green Cosmos EP. They're sticking to their M.O. of repeating a single odd musical or lyrical phrase ("I did crimes for you, they're coming true!") again and again until it sounds like a hook; beyond that, you can tell that they're trying to wriggle out of what they've been doing in the band's previous phase, but haven't quite figured out what comes next.

In particular, they keep sidling up to the kind of heavy rock that's been their secret weapon in the past, then bolting away from it. Deerhoof have always had a difficult relationship with great big stomps and riffs, but in the past their clever self-sabotage has often let a cracked-but-intact rock song sneak through-- Friend Opportunity's "+81", Apple O''s "Dummy Discards a Heart", Offend Maggie's "The Tears and Music of Love".

There's nothing anywhere near as direct as those songs here. Instead, we get the likes of "The Merry Barracks": A handful of rhythmically lopsided loops that eventually synch up with Saunier murmuring "Hello hello hello/ Atomic bombs are going to explode," then a passage where Matsuzaki's clear-voiced, unemphatic simper alternates with the band going WHAM WHAM WHAM, 15 seconds of the whole group doing their best imitation of '92 shoegaze, a free-noise guitar solo, and so on. It's also the first of two different songs that include the line "everyone, everyone, sing!" (The Saunier-sung closer, "Almost Everyone, Almost Always", begins with a variation: "Everyone, everyone, in a bow tie.")

What keeps Deerhoof entertaining even at their most distracted is that they actually mean that "everyone sing" bit: they're as open-hearted and goofy as egghead experimentalists get. "No One Asked to Dance", one of the prettiest songs they've ever recorded, could be incidental music from a late-60s European art movie; "Let's Dance the Jet" actually is a cover of a Mikis Theodorakis piece from a 1967 film, The Day the Fish Came Out-- a drone-plus-freaky-rhythm instrumental that's a welcome reminder that Deerhoof didn't invent this stuff.

Saunier indicated in a recent Popnography interview that all four members of Deerhoof individually write songs, which the other members then alter until everyone's satisfied with them. Sometimes that works out nicely: "Must Fight Current", a duet between Matsuzaki and guitarist John Dieterich, adopts the old Sleater-Kinney effect of two different songs that just happen to work when they're superimposed, then dials it down to a prickly, dissonant samba. Often, though, what's left of these songs is too much or too little. There's a lot to be said for ADD-- it's a pretty good strategy for not being boring-- but Deerhoof are fighting so hard to avoid obviousness and stasis that they're starting to undermine themselves.